A practical and informative reference for the Service Availability Forum specifications, this book gives a cohesive explanation of the founding principles, motivation behind the design of the specifications, and the solutions, usage scenarios and limitations that a final system may have. Avoiding complex mathematical explanations, the book takes a pragmatic approach by discussing issues that are as close as possible to the daily software design/development by practitioners, and yet at a level that still takes in the overall picture. As a result, practitioners will be able to use the specifications as intended.

• Takes a practical approach, giving guidance on the use of the specifications to explain the architecture, redundancy models and dependencies of the Service Availability (SA) Forum services
• Explains how service availability provides fault tolerance at the service level
• Clarifies how the SA Forum solution is supported by open source implementations of the middleware
• Includes fragments of code, simple example and use cases to give readers a practical understanding of the topic
• Provides a stepping stone for applications and system designers, developers and advanced students to help them understand and use the specifications